Texts

http://www.lardbuurman.nl/text/about-the-african-city

on Africa Junctions

African cities are complex. They are overcrowded and chaotic cities, lacking good infrastructure, that to a large extent have grown out of their peripheries without planning. For many of the city’s inhabitants life happens on the streets. Public and private are intermingled. A sidewalk often also functions as a store. A traffic jam means stoppage to some, while to others it means work. To a greater or lesser extent African cities are marked by their colonial histories, informal structures, bad governance and large social inequality. Belgian anthropologist Filip De Boeck, who did research in Kinshasa, talks about the “invisible city”. On the one hand he means the lack of attention to and establishment of a certain image about the African city, on the other hand the invisible urban patterns and networks that arise mostly informally. Theories about the African city expanded enormously in the last decade. By using western models in the analysis of African cities, one jumps to the conclusion that they must be dysfunctional. This conclusion does not provide for answers about how these cities actually do function. These are cities in which millions of people live their daily life, giving rise to urban cultures different from the ones with which we are familiar.

In my project Africa Junctions – Capturing the City I show the African city and its developments by focusing on the everyday street scenes of the city. I walk through African cities and notice the chaos of the fragmented, segregated and hectic cities, but first and foremost I notice the everyday life that takes place amidst this overwhelming bustle.

The ‘commonplace’ remains my point of departure in my constructed images. Within an African context this proves to be a deviating view. In most documentaries about Johannesburg we see armed robberies. In Lagos ‘area-boys’ run the show. It is true, but it is part of a larger context that remains largely unseen. Apparently the quotidian is not fascinating enough. I choose for a panorama image of the city. From Vinex, central business district up to the slums. In these different areas I look at street life and the urban space. I ‘de-dramatise’ the image.

Since beginning my work in African cities, I ask myself new questions about the term ‘documentary photography’. In this project I started seeing my role as a documentarian and as storyteller, as documentary photographer and as an artist. The story about the commonplace in African cities is capable of surprising us. It can touch us through the otherness of its urban culture and its multifaceted complexity. It can give us an idea about a possible future for our own cities, because globalization, crisis and our aging populations will undermine our securities in the future. What kind of urban development is awaiting us?

http://www.lardbuurman.nl/text/about-my-theme

About my theme

A recurring theme in my photography is urban public space. This space is not only defined by buildings, architecture and infrastructure, but above all by the people who inhabit this space. My interest is first of all in these people; in their use of the city; in the functioning of public space; and in the (co-)habitation in an urban landscape.

Instead of focusing on standard architectural highlights or the typological clichés of public space – ‘the square’, ‘the marketplace’, ‘the park’ –, I focus on ‘people as infrastructure’. This is also the title of an essay by urbanist and sociologist AbdouMaliq Simone, who tries to shift our attention away from the typical ‘hard’ focus on urban development toward the infrastructural significance of fluid streams of people. Therefore, the human body and the movements of individuals and groups (spatial choreography) play an important role in my photographs. I pay attention to peoples’ poses, the shapes that bodies take through acts like walking, waiting and carrying. I let the movement of the city resonate in an image and turn it into a metaphor for the changeability and flexibility of these cities and their inhabitants.

During my first years as an artist I primarily did research in Europe. China followed in 2004 and since 2008 I have immersed myself in African cities.

http://www.lardbuurman.nl/text/artist-statement

About my photography

“The term ‘photography’ simply does not suffice when describing the body of work by Lard Buurman. The 21st century, for all its advances and overload in terms of the availability and retrievability of information, is severely behind regarding the necessary (re)definition of descriptors for hybrid artistic practices, of which Buurman’s systematic photographic constructions are a noteworthy example.” – Alexander Opper 1

This quote, from the essay for my publication written by South African architect Alexander Opper, expresses my search as a photographer for new and hybrid forms of storytelling. In my work I bring together the documentary aspects of photography with the fictive aspects of image manipulation. I do this by recreating the photographic image through many different exposures made from the same perspective. Thus I create, in retrospect, the photographic moment. One could say that in this way I undermine photography’s claims to truth. Even though we live in times in which we all know that a photograph is not reality, in documentary photography manipulation of the moment is still considered taboo. Erroneously, I think, because each photograph is a manipulation of reality. The recorded, frozen moment itself is a construction of photography.

In my photographs I do not so much want to record the reality of the moment, but rather the everyday reality of the place. By the combination of images out of multiple ‘documentary’ photographs, a hybrid form between documentary and staged photography comes into existence. At the same time I play with the possibility of a crossing with cinematography. I connect the static immediacy of the singular photographic snap with the energy innate to the movement of cinema. In this way I developed a personal photographic language.